When the happy day finally and inevitably comes that the Umno/BN regime is overthrown and its members, cronies and supporters in its ‘justice’ system, uncivil services, fake NGOs and mendacious media go on trial for their multifarious crimes against Malaysia, it’s not hard to guess what most of them will plead: the defence made famous at the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals that “we were only following orders”.

Of course the man who’s currently apparently issuing the aforesaid orders, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, could always similarly claim that he’s been playing second fiddle to and thus merely following orders from First Lady of Malaysia, Rosmah Mansor.

Though in view of the current evidence I’m more inclined to think he’s preparing to plead insanity. And by insanity I’m not just instancing the combination of narcissistic personality disorder, megalomania, mythomania and kleptomania from which he and his accomplices chronically suffer, but outright babbling lunacy.
Thus if there’s a decent lawyer remaining who’s prepared to defend him when he finally faces an honest judge in a legitimate court, instead of a spell behind bars with his accomplices in the Umno/BN wing of Sungei Buloh, Najib might get to spend his retirement in the relative comfort of Tanjong Rambutan or some other hospital bahagia.

Because, let’s face it, he appears to have genuinely gone barking mad. Witness, for example, his latest looney-tunes attempts to loot Malaysia, first with the phoney ‘sovereign wealth fund’ 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), and now a GST forcing ordinary people to foot the bill for all the billions stolen and squandered by Umno/BN.

And if all that wasn’t enough proof that he’s living in some wacky world of his own, there’s the fact as well as the timing of his splurging on the fabulously luxurious and outrageously expensive replacement of the VIP Airbus in which he and Rosmah having been flying high for years in the face of popular fury and scorn.

Then there’s his ordering of the ongoing rabid-dog response to critics and opponents of these scams by his madcap official enforcers, Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar and Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.

Both of whom Najib is crazy for not having fired long ago; Khalid for his virtually psychotic delusion that he’s entitled to interpret the laws as selectively against critics of the regime as he likes, or else to simply make up his own laws as he goes along; and Zahid for letter he notoriously wrote to the US authorities in support of alleged illegal gambling kingpin and, as many of us strongly suspect, Umno/BN money-launderer Paul Phua.

Of course all this current evidence of criminal insanity is hardly surprising, as Najib’s grip on reality has long been highly suspect in light of his penchant for spouting a pack of lies that nobody in his her right mind could possibly believe. Ever since he came to power he’s been babbling away with such patent nonsense as “1Malaysia. People first. Performance now”, “making Malaysia the world’s best democracy”, “zero tolerance for corruption”, the pre-GE13 “Election Integrity Pledge”, and promises to repeal the Sedition Act that he’s now psychopathically employing against his critics and opponents.

But not, I hasten to add, against all his critics and opponents, of whom former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is the most prominent and even, at times, outspoken. And here we reach the very crux of Najib’s case for his eventually pleading insanity, as he’s crazy if he doesn’t silence Mahathir by slapping with a sedition charge, and equally crazy if he does.

Najib must also be dimly aware, at least somewhere his disordered mind, that in Mahathir he’s dealing with an adversary that’s not only even crazier than himself in all the customary Umno/BN senses of monomania, megalomania, mythomania and kleptomania, but also crazier in the deliberate and self-serving sense of “like a fox”.

A fox that Najib would be suicidally insane to try to hunt down and politically assassinate with some trumped-up charge and travesty of trial as both he and Mahathir have done to Anwar Ibrahim, or to outright slaughter as members of Najib’s bodyguard have been convicted of doing in the case of the Mongolian ‘model’ involved in the Scorpene submarines scandal back when Najib was defence minister, Altantuya Shaariibuu.

Mahathir’s recent blog calling for an investigation into allegations by Sirul Azhar Umar, one of the former police commandos convicted of Altantuya’s killing and was unaccountably allowed to flee to Australia, that he and his partner in the crime were “only following orders” is the old fox’s most vicious attack yet on Najib.

Not that I or anyone else imagines that this effort to imply that Najib or some close associate was what he called the “hidden hand” behind the murder of the Mongolian and her unborn child is in anything like the public interest on Mahathir’s part, or a sign of some belated, not to say death-bed conversion to the concepts of truth and justice.

Mahathir has never shown the slightest remorse for his perversion of Malaysia’s formerly proud justice system or his muzzling of the news media to enable him to escape punishment in the court of informed public opinion for his regime’s systematic corruption and other crimes.

In fact, in the only instance I can remember of his agreeing to appear to give evidence at one of the so-called Royal Commissions of Inquiry regularly staged by Umno/BN to whitewash its nefarious activities, he claimed almost complete loss of memory.

Despite acceptance of this bout of amnesia by the RCI into irregularities in judicial appointments, however, nobody, even or perhaps especially Najib, imagines that Mahathir has less than total recall of every guilty secret of every Umno/BN administration in living memory.

Thus when he calls for Najib’s resignation on account of the 1MDB scandal, as he did several weeks ago, and now ups the ante as with his current declaration that Umno/BN is doomed in the next general election unless Najib steps down, and further twists the knife by resurrecting the Altantuya affair, the entire regime goes gaga with fear.

At the fact that he not only has the goods – or rather bads – on every single one of them, but that he’s so desperate to get his son Mukhriz into line for the eventual premiership, and at his advanced age so virtually immune from retribution, that they’d be bonkers to call his bluff.

Not that many have attempted this yet. Admittedly a few small-fry have attempted pathetically weak rebuttals of his remarks, as in Sabah speaker Salleh Said Keruak’s lame claims that Najib’s lavish new jet is for “security” reasons and that 1MDB is only five years old, and Pulai MP Nur Jazlan Mohamed’s delusional driveling that he “has not seen anything to prove 1MDB’s difficulties in paying its debts or Najib and his wife Rosmah Mansor’s alleged lavish lifestyle is costing the PM support.”

But, as customary at such crunch times, there has been nothing but dead silence from Najib, save for a couple of characteristically nitwitted remarks like “the GST is haram” and that at times he finds hawker food tastier than far costlier dishes at five-star hotels. More evidence, in other words, for the proposition that in case he finally goes on trial for crimes against Malaysia, he’s planning to plead inanity if not outright insanity.